Hex: A Novel (21 page)

Goodbye
, said Thingy, but only to me. To the rest of the world she gave a enthusiastic greeting and inside me the baby, asleep until now, woke with a start and pushed up against my skin as if suddenly lonely, desperate for warmth.

I didn’t know what to say to Thingy, so I seized on the story of the Sainte Maria and we talked about her instead. Since Luke’s exile the summer I turned thirteen the Sainte Maria and I had barely seen each other. Or at least not at more than at a distance. Not more than in parts: her bare ankle flashing below the bat wing of a car door, the sleeve of her coat—the same tattered leopard—caught up for just a moment on the doorknob before she tugged it free.

This was mostly true. On that day four months before when I had walked down the slope from my house to the Feed Store, the Sainte Maria, standing in the restaurant’s kitchen and sliding her dirty bowl into the dishwater, looked at me with the same
lack of interest a well-fed cat lying in a square of sunlight would regard a small rodent or bird. As if to say
Tut Tut
, as if to say
Well, look at you
. . . .

The Sainte Maria was wearing black jeans and a cropped black T-shirt. She had a bruise on her hip, just a small one as if she had been poked with a small, bony finger. She looked, standing there among the steam and damp and huffing impatience of cookery, like a seed pod that had been blow in out of season. Not insubstantial, you understand, but thorny. Not waifish or childlike, but densely concentric, liable at any moment to begin expanding rapidly outward.

She looked like a stranger, which is perhaps why I treated her like one—like the real stranger, Jacob, who turned from his work, didn’t he? Who turned from the mounds of dishes that must forever be scrubbed but would never be cleaned and looked at me with his eyes like something else’s eyes, weren’t they? As if he had lived a long time in darkness—

In reality, I had seen her only the week before, sitting at my father’s table, drinking a glass of milk.

I shouldn’t have been home at all. It was a Wednesday morning, a snowfall the night before tamping the world to a murmur as if just beyond the range of my hearing a great, calamitous noise was going on and on. I had stopped going to school the month before, when I could no longer deny what I had known from the first.

(The door to the motel room snicking shut behind me, the parking lot adrift with brown leaves. It was mid afternoon, a weekday. His was the only car in the lot but we’d taken a room on the side of the building facing away from the highway, and
it was a company car, identical to any number of glossy, black others. I left first, before he had gotten out of the shower. I liked imagining him coming back into the room, sleek and pink, rubbing the coarse motel towel into his ears and under his armpits. His moment of confusion when he realized I was gone; perhaps even a few words he might say to the empty room. “Alice, did you know. . .” or “Alice, have you heard. . .” before he trailed off into the lack of me: a neatly made bed, the rickety chairs drawn back up to the round table, the curtains pulled, but in between them a zip of clean, white light. Behind the motel was an empty lot grown over with fescue and great bouquets of goldenrod. There were signs all over the lot proclaiming it
For Sale! Reduced!
but these too were weathered and overgrown. A wind was blowing. Some scrubby trees that had grown up along the fence line tossed and shook, but not a single one of their brilliant red leaves broke free.)

I had refused to acknowledge my pregnancy because isn’t that what one did? Girls like me in my particularly predictable situation. I admit it had occurred to me to will this nonknowing to its farthest flung conclusion. To be one of those girls like me who give birth in the bathroom of the hamburger joint or on the floor of the laundry room at a friend’s house, sneaking away from the party, still holding my drink. The music thumping out my little sounds and the baby—born dead of course, was there another way?—bundled into the washing machine with the guest bathroom towels where, even as small as it was, it would unbalance the load. Small as a mouse, I imagined. Covered in fur but with a human face peeking out between its soft, oval ears. . .

That was impossible, I knew, a fantasy. I was always very small and began to show almost immediately. By February, when
I came home unexpectedly in the middle of the day, it was still possible to wear loose clothes and pretend I was merely gaining weight, but I couldn’t keep it up for much longer.

“Looks like your metabolism’s finally catching up to you,” Rosellen had said only the week before, eyeing me overtop a coupon circular which advertised discounts on tanning, gym memberships, mulch and ground chuck among other things. We were eating breakfast, my father long gone for a morning of plowing roads or clambering around on the roofs of houses he himself had built and which were so shoddily constructed that the shingles were already peeling beneath the ice sheets like scales sloughing from an ill-tended hide.

Pretty soon he would slip off one of those roofs and land with his right leg folded beneath him, the sound of the bone snapping, he said, prolonged and somehow chewy. He came home from the hospital in a blinding white cast that encased his leg from foot to hip. Rosellen took it upon herself to tend the cast by spritzing it with bathroom cleaner; the bleach, she reasoned, serving both the kill germs and keep the thing from growing dingy. Instead it was my father who grew dingy, his skin graying in comparison to the plaster, a smell about him like a damp cellar in which someone had foolishly been storing a side of meat.

During his recovery, Rosellen put my father up in the same way someone would swaddle and store the good china, knowing all along it would never again see the light of day. She heated blankets in the dryer and tucked them around him while he sat on the couch. She fed him soups and lit his cigarettes in her own mouth, propping them in between his lips as if everything below the level of his neck had been struck off—snicker-snack!—with one blow of the axe. My father resented this, as one might imagine, but Rosellen sailed through the house impervious and
serene, happier than she had been in a long time. When my father walked the crutch and the metal bar attached to the bottom of the cast to keep his weight from spiraling up the bone conspired together to echo through the house. Thump and drag, thump and drag. “Fie Fi Foe Fum,” yelled Rosellen from her study. My father broke a dish in the sink.

All this was on the horizon, though coming closer. Perhaps even as we spoke my father was climbing the pitch of the very roof. Perhaps he was taking a little break, catching his breath; straddling the house like a horse as he looked out over the cowed, white valley, wreathed as it must have been with plumes of his own breath. It would have been very quiet up there, the tacking hammer blows and shouts from the rest of the crew as they worked on other houses in the development coming to him as if from far away, as inconsequential as the cawing of crows lifting up from some tree or other, clustering in a tiny, distant hubbub in the ice gray sky. Who knew what they were saying? He might have thought of both crew and crows. Who cared?

“And then bam, I was falling,” my father narrated from his position on the couch. “Just like that. One minute I’m a man sitting down and the next a man spinning through the air.” I imagined his shape, arms spread like a snowflake, spinning airily downward. In reality, he surely fell more heavily—crumpled even, like a bird folding around the sudden hole in its breast—but I like to imagine him drifting, give him some leisure to look around. My father blew from the roof of the house to the ground, see-sawing as he fell. First he saw the sky, then the bristle of pine tops; the sky, then a window in which a woman looked out at him, shocked, amazed.

He landed on his back, that much I do know. “Knocked the wind right out of me,” he said. “Rolled my eyes back in my head. Tim Pruitt got there first and he said my eyes looked just like hard-boiled eggs. He said you almost wanted to touch them they were so white and so round.”

(We are not often together. Six times in four years. This is the seventh. We do not talk about our bodies, or our minds, the spaces behind our eyes. “Alright?” he says and I say, “Yes. Yes, okay.” The next time we see each other, he will ask how my father is doing and nod, not quite looking at me, reading the paper and stirring his coffee so the spoon hits the side of the mug. Ting-ting, ting-ting, ting-ting. When I think about him, I think about two people. They are both essentially strangers, but one muscles the car around curves, adjusts his wife’s umbrella in the sand, bows his head when I answer, “My father is fine,” as if I am much younger than I actually am. As if he has to decipher the slurred honey of baby-speak coming out of my mouth. The other would like me to hop up on the dresser, just like that, back to the mirror, back against the mirror, he would like to see my teeth.
Good, all right? yes good. . .just like. . .is it good?. . .oh, it is just like that, like that, it is. . . .

Not a single leaf blew off the tree, though I stood for a moment too long watching them shake and tremble. I am supposed to make my way across the lot and up the hill. There is a brief fringe of forest, the underbrush dotted with flotsam—socks and straws, small bones and plastic bags, beer cans, hanks of fur, pyramids of perfectly spherical dung—and then the tree line breaks again on the outskirts of Elevation, on the alley alongside
the TreeTop Diner, to be precise, where I will enter and sit and order myself something to eat.

The woman who owns the diner is named Marta. She brings my plate and doesn’t ask why I’m not in school. In a moment he will drive into the lot, parking his car at an angle to the road in between a white utilities truck and a hatchback with a spidered windshield where something has struck and bounced heavily away. He is just stopping in, getting a quick bite on his way back to the city. I am a surprise and when he slides in across from me in the booth, he is only being polite. How is my father? Marta brings him a plate of country ham, a cup of coffee. My father is fine. Ting-ting, ting-ting. My body blinks and when it opens its eyes again there are three of us and it has started to rain.)

Everyone thinks my father is dead. Tim Pruitt says it first and then dead echoes through the crowd that has gathered. He isn’t breathing after all, the wind knocked out of him, though he can hear perfectly well. He hasn’t moved.

“It wasn’t exactly peaceful,” my father said, “but it wasn’t too bad either. I couldn’t see anything, but at the same time I could see the sky and it was bigger than before, flatter. Like if I punched my fist up I could tear through it and feel around on the other side, but I couldn’t move and that was okay too. I just watched the sky come closer and closer. Big, flat, gray sky.”

“And then what happened?” I asked. Rosellen clucked and readjusted his blanket. Outside, Dog, geriatric now and unsteady on his legs—Bitch long dead and buried under the dragon’s belly—began to wheezily bark.

“Then Tim Pruitt stuck his damn finger in my eye,” my father said and opened his mouth for a spoonful of soup.

(
Oh oh oh. Is this okay? Is this. . .yes. . .Is this. . .
He will give me a ride back to town, because it is raining, after all, because he is concerned for my well-being. “Why aren’t you in school?” he says when Marta bends over the table to refill his coffee. He cuts all his ham into little bites and then picks them up one by one to put in his mouth. Marta jingles the coins in her apron and would like to not hear us. She has been here for a long time watching people cut their ham into little bites, offering them pie. “Would you like some pie?” she says to me. “Isn’t it a school day?” he says to me. Marta jingles her coins and moves on.
Oh oh oh. Is this okay? Yes, it is. It is good
.)

Instead of school, I had been going to the library and spending my days with Miss Fawcett. The building is an old one and used to be the train station when the train still came through town. The ceilings are high and vaulted, painted a deep blue and the vaulting a jungly green as if the passenger waiting for her train was taking shelter beneath a bower made of vine, tendrils uncoiling even as she pressed her lips against a tissue and snapped her compact shut.

Now, however, everything is falling apart. The building was then and I assume remains damp, the books closest to the wall swollen between their covers. Miss Fawcett too seemed damp, like a handkerchief soaked and then wrung dry. After a few early attempts to find out what I was doing there, she largely left me alone to browse the stacks. Sometimes as I read a patter of green paint chips would sift down from the ceiling and drift across the pages of the book. Sometimes, Miss Fawcett would sit down across from me and offer me half of her sandwich, watch me as I ate it with an avidness that made me feel as if any second I would find my mouth filled with soil, a
vine shooting out of my nose and curling up toward the decaying net of the ceiling.

“You might as well have this, too,” Rosellen said, tapping her toast on the napkin in a shower of crumbs and sliding it onto my plate. “Or do you want another egg? I could boil one.”

“Tuna salad,” Miss Fawcett said. She wrinkled her nose as if she weren’t the one to make the sandwich just that morning, pulling a leaf of lettuce from the head as she stood at the kitchen counter, trimming the crusts. A sheet of snow slid off the roof and rippled past the window. We were all buried alive, it was true. Nothing to sustain any of us but dry toast and tuna salad, a mildewed copy of
Watership Down
, an egg timer, a gust of wind that somehow made its way inside and then racketed around.

“Hard or soft?” Rosellen said.

Miss Fawcett tapped the book’s cover, her blunt nail striking the air just above the rabbit’s head. The book showed a beautiful place: a long slope of waving grains, a golden wood receding into umber shadows beneath a pale golden sky. The rabbit, too, was gold and wary; his ears skewed to listen, a ring of white around his liquid eye. “It’s hard to believe someone could find so much to say about a rabbit,” she said. Then she coughed. Then she sighed and looked out the window where the white world deadened itself, no shadows.

One Monday Miss Fawcett was ill, blowing her nose into tissues she then left wadded up on the countertops or in the shelves like stiff, white chrysanthemums. The next day she was
sicker still and Wednesday, when I came down the hill from the school and tried the library doors, I found them locked and a handwritten sign in the front window that read
Closed, Due to Illness
There was no one to replace her, which is not to say she was irreplaceable, but it did leave me in a quandary. The steps were icy. A path had been scraped straight up the center by the man who ran the auto parts store across the street but had been left to glaze slick and narrow between wind-carved banks of snow. There was nowhere to sit. Nowhere to enter. It was very cold.

A car came down the hill and spun on the ice, its rump swaying gracefully back and forth over the lane marker. The driver looked right through me, her face a pale oval filled with other ovals. Then the tires caught. She inched past and disappeared around the bend.

I rattled the door again, but the lock held. Up the street two old woman were walking with their arms latched at the elbow, puffy pink heads bent down toward their feet. A bell rang at the school. The wind whirled up a funnel of salt and sand which blustered around the street and then subsided.

There was nothing to do but go home and so I went: up the hill and around the bend, past the Laundromat, past the saw mill, past Thingy’s house where the porch light was still on, its yellow stain swallowed by the snow, through the side yard and up the stairs, ducking under the dragon’s neck. I had warmed my key in my pocket, but it was still stiff in the lock and had to be coaxed and jiggled. Even with all that extra warning the Sainte Maria didn’t see fit to rise from the kitchen table or pull her shirt all the way closed.

(An egg pushes the golden wall. Pressure from below, darkness. There is a tide that pushes past, something that drifts and
clings. Feathers in the wall which push, push. A quavering, a shivering. The egg bounces into shape and floats free. Then comes the long journey down the mountain.)